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SSLPing creator here.

There are backups, the db is safe. But you can't easily fix a Docker Swarm cluster when Docker refuses to run, systemd tries to replace upstart, etc. The message I wrote tells the whole story, and backups were not the problem (I even had a redundant 3 way database cluster which most commercial companies don't have).


It seems that posts stay floated near the top of https://news.ycombinator.com/best for a max of maybe ~5-6 days. This has been up for 1-2 days and from a conservative engineering perspective I'd probably be comfortable relying on it staying there for at least 2 more.

So you have a one-shot opportunity for the next day or two to consider changing the webpage to say something different.

Reading the sentiment amongst the comments and the perspective you've also shared, some significant points emerge for me:

- This is a side project you were really invested in and you're really sad to see it go

- It wasn't generating very much money, but you weren't in it for the money

- A few people definitely used and appreciated it - so it had a decent bit of mindshare

IMHO this could easily either go the open source route, or a small private team of assistants could help contribute to getting this going again and maybe contribute toward maintaining it in as people have spare time available.

- You appear to have some level of one-step-beyond-MVP mindshare, and a catchy name. Not only would this make it tricky for forks to take off in an open-source setting, but I can also see full-clone attempts being promptly chased away with pitchforks as well. This is the scenario where open source shines I think - the risk of wholesale copying seems interestingly low.

- You aren't interested in this for the money, so opening the codebase doesn't really let especially novel cats out of any bags

- There is enough clear interest that people will definitely show up to help

Some other considerations:

- Instead of committing to open-sourcing immediately you could also build a team out of all the people expressing interest in contributing spare time. I honestly wonder if the energy level would be lower than a traditional open source project. In this case I can see enough interest coming to the table to help unravel the existing codebase, and enough people might even stick around long-term to help out with simple maintenance hitches and fixes as they come up.

- If there were any concerns about forks/clones the exceptionally restrictive AGPLv3 would probably take care of those sufficiently well (perhaps this is a good question for the theoretical team mentioned above)

TL;DR, my opinion is that if you maybe want to take a break for a while but dive back into this in the future CHANGE THE WEBPAGE NOW while eyeballs are still looking at it. Point people at a Discord server or empty GitHub repository (lots of closed-source stuff uses GitHub for issues) to pin or star so they get pinged when there's activity in the future.

Of course the caveat is that I can only respond to the context I can see, and this may not be useful advice. Kind of an on-the-spot "uhhhhh....", good luck :P


thanks man! This goes straight to my heart (yeah, I'm chris, I amended the message on sslping.com to show my HN profile). I surely didn't expect SSLPing to END its life on the first page of HN. I'm sad today, really sad :( but my users were the best!


Hey! SSLPing creator here... I feel your pain, deeply, inside me at the moment!


Hey ! I'm the creator of SSLPing... yup, I'm the guy who got famous when he killed his dream.

Switch to K3S, you won't regret it. I was hesitant to pour more work into my project to switch to K8S (which I know well, it's part of my day job !)... K3S is an excellent way to get into Kubernetes. Or use Digital Ocean's or other hosted implementations...

Kubernetes has a lot to offer... peace of mind is one of them !


> Switch to K3S, you won't regret it.

K3s is pretty great, at least as long as you keep on the happy path.

In practice, that probably means a DEB based distro, quite possibly Ubuntu LTS and something like Rancher for management (if you prefer a UI of some sort and can afford the spare RAM), or Portainer, or even just Lens.

Sadly, i had a situation where i needed Kubernetes on a server at work, which had about 8 GB of RAM, so OpenShift was out of the question and most other "full" K8s distros also weren't viable, when that same server was also to run the actual containers. Moreso, i was stuck with Oracle Linux, on which getting K3s working properly was a bit problematic (though the same probably applies to most RPM distros).

Not only that, but instead of Let's Encrypt, i needed to use custom SSL/TLS certificates, installing which with the Traefik ingress and using them as the defaults instead of the self-signed ones was quite the mess, about which i wrote in another comment here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30672765

In short, to get it working i needed:

  - a ConfigMap for Traefik, knowledge about the structure of the ConfigMap (tls.stores.default.defaultCertificate)
  - a TLSSecret for storing the actual certificate/key
  - a TLSStore (which i also needed to actually use the secret, spec.defaultCertificate.secretName)
  - a HelmChartConfig for Traefik to load the ConfigMap with the mounted secrets and config
none of which were documented as well as i'd like, because Traefik isn't necessarily aware of the intricacies of being used with K3s and K3s hasn't got instructions on such a setup because the happy path is using Let's Encrypt. Furthermore, attempting to use Nginx as the ingress instead failed and trying to uninstall all of Traefik resources hanged, something about Kubernetes waiting for the resources to do something so that they may be deleted, a callback that never seemed to happen.

Oh, attempting to use Rancher also failed due to recent changes with cgroups v2 and varying support for all of that, whereas it seemed to work properly on a throwaway Ubuntu LTS VM/VPS.

In short:

  - i still think that the goals of the K3s project are really nice, the current resource usage is surprisingly decent
  - if you have to use Kubernetes on RPM, go with OpenShift, if you don't have the resources for it, just use DEB distros
  - the struggle with niche setups, like i needed, is largely not worth your time, the documentation for these still isn't there yet (example of mature documentation: Apache, which has been around for decades)
  - ideally, just pay someone else to run a cluster for you, if you can (i can't, because mostly on-prem at work and am relatively poor in regards to personal homelab)
I'm still torn about migrating over to Nomad or K3s when i'll eventually retire my Docker Swarm clusters (maybe in the next 5 years), but for now i'm putting those plans on the backburner entirely to give both projects a few years to mature and become more stable/established. In regards to Rancher, they have RKE2 in the works as well.


I've been using k3s on Ubuntu (for development) for a while, and I switched it to ingress-nginx and cert-manager... It was always straightforward.

But I must admit it's easy/easier when someone else is managing K8S for you, be it DigitalOcean or Tencent (which I have experience with) or AWS / Google Cloud.

K3S is quite comparable to Docker Swarm though. I liked Swarm when I developed SSLPing because of its simplicity compared to K8S, but once you learn your way through K8S, there's no point sticking to Swarm I think...


I know you say you will let the projects mature, but I think it's a pretty good time to start picking up Kubernetes or at least getting your hands dirty with it. Nomad is a much simpler solution but not nearly as popular, in-depth or in demand as Kubernetes.

If you wanted an 'in' to Kubernetes and better automation of your homelab. I would suggest to check out this repo[1], it's nearly a A-Z guide on getting k3s running on Ubuntu (I am no distro-snob, Ubuntu just works well for most home workloads in Kubernetes). GitOps tools like Flux and Argo are really becoming popular to use with Kubernetes because all your configuration is stored in Git and the GitOps tools deploy manifests based on the Git repo state. My entire home cluster[2] is open source and there's many who are also doing something similar[3].

All of this comes at a cost of learning these tools which is not easy, but from my interactions with people who do take the plunge from docker-compose or docker-swarm most of them stay and once they see the benefits of GitOps and Kubernetes cannot go back to their previous ways. Automation is king and it is much easier using Kubernetes because most of the tools exist for it already.

1. https://github.com/k8s-at-home/template-cluster-k3s

2. https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops

3. https://github.com/k8s-at-home/awesome-home-kubernetes


Hi I'm chris, the creator of sslping.

Actually, we're talking "small" amounts. I had 3 dedicated servers hosted in France, which is cheap compared to the USA for dedicated servers. I was paying 65€ per month, for 5 years.

How could testing SSL use that much? well, I wanted an HA mongodb setup, and I wanted to support millions of servers. SSLPing was super fast, around 5 seconds to check your SSL versions, cyphers, check some vulnerabilities, etc... when SSLLabs takes 2 minutes.

And yes, despite 1100 total signups in my database, I had only 3 patreons... The maximum I had was 5.

The web is a strange place. I'm looking into sslping very differently today. Yesterday I killed it, and received tens of emails from users to thank me, and today I'm on the first page of HN... because I killed my project.

Do I have to say that I didn't dare ask people to pay for sslping because I thought is wasn't worth it?


Ping me at Joe.Drumgoole@mongodb.com and I can organise payment of all those costs if you want to continue.


would you like help keeping it alive? or reviving it?

i’m open to help: from untangling the issues it has now to hosting, to rearchitecting it.


let’s fucking go boys!


I can't agree more... I'm the creator of SSLPing, and I can say it sucks BIG TIME to discover people loved your product and your product is on the first page of HN just after you had to kill it !


Hi I'm the creator of sslping.

I'm just discovering that sslping is on the first page of HN. It hurts to have to kill your project, but it hurts even more to become famous after your death!

I've received 30+ super kind emails from users, and even a donation... I didn't even know I had such a fan base


You did good, and you're doing good by killing this the way you need to for your own reasons. You don't owe anyone anything.

Hang in there.


That's why I think combatting fake news actually promoted them and made the world a worse place: when people hear "fake news", they've learnt to doubt the "fake" part and start thinking this news is "so worth it that Facebook/Google/the media is combatting it, so I remain ignorant of that information that is vital to me".

That's how I think combatting fake news made things worse for the very people we're trying to protect: it pushed them deeper into the fakeverse (TM).

Second order effects...


My online bank account was shut because AI couldn't identify me on photos for KYC. I grew older in 30 years, who knew... I hate KYC with a passion.


No better than patent trolls


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